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作者：BARNETT, PG; KEELER, TE; HU, TW
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley
摘要：A model of oligopoly price behavior and tax incidence for the U.S. cigarette industry for the period 1955-1990 is presented. A cost function is estimated, and shows manufacture to be subject to increasing returns to scale. The mean price elasticity of demand is -0.71. The model indicates that competition among manufacturers has been decreasing since 1980. A simulation shows that an increase in the federal excise tax causes a greater increase in price, and a greater decrease in consumption, tha...
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作者：LAFFONT, JJ
作者单位：Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole
摘要：A large class or major environmental risks are subject to severe moral hazard problems. The purpose of this paper is to study the potential conflicts between cost minimization and safety care. The intuition is that regulatory efforts or sheer competition inducing a greater focus on cost minimization may tilt the agents' trade-off towards taking too much risk. Here we study the problem in the context of regulation of a natural monopoly and see how high powered incentives may conflict with safet...
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作者：BOS, D; PETERS, W
摘要：The management of a single-product monopoly sets the number of employees and the number of production teams which are to be established. However, it is well known that employees shirk in teams. Moreover, there is yet another inefficiency which is caused through the management's adjustment to its uncertain environment. The management will not choose the internal organization of the firm which minimizes costs, because this would reduce the expected revenue (or surplus if it manages a public firm...
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作者：BUCOVETSKY, S
摘要：Regional or local governments often appear to favour the interests of those who own land in the region. Here the implications of this sort of policy making are modelled formally. People are assumed perfectly mobile between regions, but are assumed to own land only in the region of their birth. The Nash equilibrium is shown to be efficient if and only if no migration (of capital or labour) is needed to achieve efficiency. Otherwise, tax competition leads to too little migration. Voluntary inter...
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作者：BOVENBERG, AL; SMULDERS, S
作者单位：Erasmus University Rotterdam; Erasmus University Rotterdam - Excl Erasmus MC; Centre for Economic Policy Research - UK; Tilburg University
摘要：This paper explores the link between environmental quality and economic growth in an endogenous growth model that incorporates pollution-augmenting technological change. It examines the conditions under which sustainable growth is both feasible and optimal. We explore also how the government should intervene to ensure the optimal levels of natural and knowledge capital, which share a public-goods character. We establish the conditions for a more ambitious environmental policy to raise long-run...
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作者：BUCHHOLZ, W; KONRAD, KA
作者单位：Free University of Berlin; University of Bergen
摘要：This paper considers strategic monetary transfers between two agents when these contribute to a mutual public good. If the agents differ in their contribution productivity, then the less productive agent has an incentive to make large unconditional transfers to the more productive agent. Although agents move simultaneously in each stage of the game, the less productive agent becomes a Stackelberg leader. Furthermore, the generic subgame perfect equilibrium is characterized by full specializati...
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作者：BOSE, P
摘要：This paper shows that with a hierarchical structure of enforcement, regulatory errors cause the optimal penalty to be non-maximal even if offenders are risk neutral (and fines are pure transfers), and the private benefit from violation is strictly less than the social cost for all individuals. In contrast, with error-free monitoring, no finite fine is optimal within the same hierarchical structure. Also, full compliance is an equilibrium outcome in the presence of errors whereas, in the absenc...
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作者：HOFF, K; LYON, AB
摘要：Economists generally have argued that income redistribution comes at a cost in aggregate income. We provide a counter-example in a model where private information gives rise to incentive constraints. In the model, a wage tax creates the usual distortion in labor-leisure choices, but the redistributive grants that it finances reduce a distortion in investment in higher education. We prove that simple redistributive policies can yield Pareto improvements and increase aggregate income. Indeed, re...
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作者：NELISSEN, JHM
摘要：This paper looks at how the Dutch General Old-Age Pensions Act impacts the distribution of equivalent lifetime income, using a dynamic cross-sectional microsimulation model. Considering both vertical and horizontal redistributional effects, the paper shows that lifetime redistribution is considerably smaller than the redistribution measured on the basis of a period approach. The horizontal lifetime redistribution is more important than the vertical one, but this effect is rather limited, in pa...
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作者：HOWITT, P; WINTROBE, R
作者单位：Western University (University of Western Ontario)
摘要：This paper develops a simple model of political inaction in a two-party democracy, i.e. it shows the conditions under which both parties will prefer to live with an unsatisfactory and inefficient status quo rather than to raise an issue. The risk of raising the issue to either party is the fear of ending up with the other party's policy (for example, by losing the election), regarded as even worse than the status quo. The model shows that the problem is likely to be particularly serious, the m...
